Learn Algerian Arabic through example sentences

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Welcome to the English-Algerian Arabic dictionary.

Algerian Arabic is a variety of North African (or Maghribi) Arabic spoken in most of northern Algeria, where most Algerians live. Most of the sentences contained in this dictionary come from the Algerian Arabic variety spoken in Algiers. To transcribe Algerian Arabic, we have used the Latin alphabet commonly used to write Amazigh (Berber) in North Africa. The alphabet was chose for its practical character which we find is more suitable for the transcription of Algerian Arabic phonology (especially vowels a, i, u, and e that are difficult to transcribe in the traditional Arabic alphabet which is more suited to write classical Arabic).

Important note: The dictionary is still under construction. It may contain over a thousand entries with many more example sentences, but you might also not be able to find thousands of other words in it. So please be patient as we continue to add more content to it.

We started this dictionary to help people learn Algerian Arabic with example sentences. In fact, example sentences are very practical for learning languages. They don't only help people learn practical phrases they need for communication, but they also make it easier for them to memorize new words and learn how to correctly use them in sentences. So this is the strategy we have followed in this dictionary.

Another objective we have behind this dictionary project is to document Algerian Arabic which is mainly an oral language (i.e. not a written language that people can read in books and newspapers). So we felt that it is necessary to have a corpus of example sentences in writing that could be used for further projects like smaller dictionaries, phrase books, lesson books, a basis for textbooks, linguistic studies, etc.

And a third objective stems from my interest in Amazigh (Berber) linguistics and my activities to document especially undocumented and endangered Amazigh dialects (such as the Blida Atlas Amazigh dialect, the Dahra Amazigh dialect, and the dialects spoken in the southwest of Algeria. Although corpus collection for the purpose of documentation of an oral language generally relies on audio recordings of the the language in question (something that I have been doing for years now), I have decided to document some Amazigh dialects through example sentences by asking bilingual Amazigh-speakers to translate lgerian-Arabic sentences to their Amazigh variety.

Most of the English sentences come from Tatoeba, but I'm planning to add several thousand other sentences that are not part of Tatoeba's corpus.

We hope you'll have fun using this dictionary and you'll find this resource very helpful for learning and understanding Algerian Arabic.